The black face team of Mack and Moran were onetime show biz royalty, the top of their now abandoned calling, the art of minstrelty. In 1929 everyone knew them, and this genre of Vaudeville. Until now, just having seen this very rare feature, I'd only been exposed to their hugely successful phonograph recordings, their late Educational shorts, and the severely awful Sennett film, HYPNOTIZED. So I've always thought of them as pretty bad, with Amos n' Andy very quickly surpassing them in the early 1930s, and it's obvious why-they could be funny.
Now I see that M & M could be funny, and the scenes of their re-created Broadway show act prove it. They do the (by then) years old "Early bird gets the Worm" routine, and it was very amusing, because unlike the records, you can see it as a performance. So I was happily surprised. The rest of the film is the old, old story of partners split up by a no-good dame that breaks up the act, then,a lesson learned and they get back together. The payoff scene has Mack, unconscious in a hospital bed, touch and go, but ebbing fast, and Moran, in a desperate bid to snap him out of it, is pulled from the theatre without taking the time to remove his minstrel makeup, and dressed as a convict to boot. Nothing works until he tearfully calls out their act's feeder lines, and with that, he responds and tearfully wakes up and a great big happy tearful relief takes over. It's ludicrous, but since this kind of Victoriana was regularly staged for laughs, we can assume that only the most backward audience would take it seriously in 1929, too.
Now I see that M & M could be funny, and the scenes of their re-created Broadway show act prove it. They do the (by then) years old "Early bird gets the Worm" routine, and it was very amusing, because unlike the records, you can see it as a performance. So I was happily surprised. The rest of the film is the old, old story of partners split up by a no-good dame that breaks up the act, then,a lesson learned and they get back together. The payoff scene has Mack, unconscious in a hospital bed, touch and go, but ebbing fast, and Moran, in a desperate bid to snap him out of it, is pulled from the theatre without taking the time to remove his minstrel makeup, and dressed as a convict to boot. Nothing works until he tearfully calls out their act's feeder lines, and with that, he responds and tearfully wakes up and a great big happy tearful relief takes over. It's ludicrous, but since this kind of Victoriana was regularly staged for laughs, we can assume that only the most backward audience would take it seriously in 1929, too.
